MarketingSherpa on Lean PR Campaigns

MarketingSherpa is one of the leading research firms specializing in tracking what works in all aspects of marketing. Their goal, according to their web site, is “to give marketers of the world the stats, inspiration, and instructions to improve their results.”

To me, that sounds a lot like one of the basic tenets of Lean Marketing, and that’s just one of the many reasons I’m a big fan of MarketingSherpa. It’s a place where marketers learn from each other, leverage the good things our brilliant peers have done, and avoid the mistakes of others.

The case study describes how we used the vast amounts of Internet threat data we had access to through the Commtouch GlobalView cloud to generate media coverage. We did this by creating slick quarterly trend reports that we then publicized to the media with press releases and pitch phone calls/emails.

Reading the case study, it almost sounds like we had the whole thing figured out and planned from the start, and we knew exactly what would work and what wouldn’t. But the truth is, I initiated the creation of quarterly trend reports in my first year with Commtouch (2006) as a way to generate media coverage and create co-brandable content with our OEM partners. And over the course of the following six years with each quarterly report we refined and improved the process, expanding the marketing tools related to the report, increasing media outreach, and generally experimenting with new ways to optimize this rich content piece and its surrounding marketing campaigns. Almost every quarter our marketing team tried something new with the report, and if it worked, we kept it, and if it didn’t add anything, we dropped it the next quarter. Some of the things we tried along the way included:

Adding new sections to the report

Pitching it to selected members of the media before the report came out to increase coverage